TheDeSocios.com

Place for new Christians

Frequently, established church have pressure placed on them to care for the needs of the people already present, this means that often the older a church is the more time it ends up spending on programs and services intended to care for and retain its existing members. This doesn’t mean that older churches don’t care for new Christians, it just means that often they are better equipped at training more mature Christians.

Intentional reevaluation
The old saying “foundations are forever” means that when you start a new church, it is important to examine what cultural foundations you will be laying. New churches have the unique opportunity to reevaluate customary ways of doing church, with less fear that they might divide a church over any issue. This reevaluation gives does two things: First, it lets new churches establish new traditions. Second, it gives new churches the freedom to connect to the historic church in ways that the previous generation of churches might have seen as undesirable, or unattainable.

New Opportunities for Service In many existing churches the pathway into service and/or leadership is often a fairly long and complicated one. Church tenure is often expected before a member is invited to or allowed to influence a church’s culture. This can often hinder how well a long-established church ministers to new groups in their area. New churches offer opportunities that are often absent in established churches. This is especially true when a new church is reaching a new group of people or a new generation.

I have been spending alot of time thinking about the church recently, and more specifically the purpose of the church.

At RPTS I was told that the purpose of the New Testament Church, was to worship. Even in seminary, I saw some flaws in this understanding. Over the last year I have become more convince that worship is not the purpose of the church. Here is why I do not see the worship as the purpose of the church, it presupposes that the culmination of Chris’t kingdom has already happened. While, I do think it is appropriate to say that we were created with the purpose of worshipping God, making this the purpose of the church does not take into account the impact of sin, and the plan of redemption. Please don’t think that I trying to remove the importance of worship in the life of the church. Read More

I want to discuss what things would be helpful in seeing more churches planted in Pittsburgh. Remember that I am speaking from my context within the PCA, but I don’t think that any of my points are necessarily limited to only the PCA. I admit that I am not an expert in the topic of church planting, but at the very least I think I could be called an avid supporter or a student of church planting. Most of the suggestions that I am going to make are coming from listening to other wiser church planters, men like Roland Allen, Harvie Conn, Bill Krispin, Tim Keller, Dick Kauffman, Bruce Finn, Ed Stetzer, and Mark Driscoll.
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I’ve been thinking about the church planting figures in the PCA, on the one hand I am encouraged that the PCA plants on average 53 new churches per year. It has been noted that this means that we are planting one new church per week.

On the down side this means that by the numbers we are not even adding one new church per presbytery (76) per year .

This figure also means that we only have one church plant for every 26 existing churches.

Are PCA churches so devoid of leaders and finances that it takes 26 of us to start a new work? The real shame is that there are many churches and presbyteries that are very active in planting which means that there must people other churches and presbyteries that are doing almost nothing.

Some statistics on the Presbyterian Church in America can be found here.

As some of you know I am in the middle of the application process for church planting assessment in the PCA. Its a long application, and it asks a number of difficult questions. One of those questions asked me to describe the first steps I would take in planting a church. I listed a number of things that I would do at a new church, but I began by saying:
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